I'm pretty torn, I was set on Ryzen until Coffee Lake got released! I don't upgrade my rig very often, I do plan on upgrading the CPU in a few years though, that's why I wanted Ryzen in the first place as I knew Zen 2 will offer more. Now I'm thinking how much more can Zen 2 actually offer? Will it beat the current flagship i7 8700K that I could upgrade to in a few years or will it offer more than that? If Zen 2's lineup is highly likely to offer something more than the i7 8700K then it makes sense to stick with a Ryzen for now as budget is limited and always will be. The rig won't likely ever be used outside of the desktop use or gaming.

While the i5-8400 is great, I don't see any point pairing it with a Z370 board, because those are the only motherboards that are out right now and the cheapest one will set you back a bit more. Strange how the other chipset boards are delayed.

A B350 board will do overclocking and will be kinda cheap depending on where you get it. The on-board sound is probably going to be strapped with older Realtek codec, which in my experience isn't good in 2017, it's OK but don't expect the on-board sound to be good unless you opt for motherboards that have ALC1220 codec which are probably nearing the $100 mark.

The AM4 socket will live on at least until 2020. Intel is probably going to switch pin count or their placement the next time they release the other generation. It's not so bad if you have an overclockable CPU, but good luck trying to get even turbo frequencies to be good on Coffee Lake. And then again the K parts are already pushed pretty far in terms of clocks already, without delidding them, you can't overclock more than 100-300MHz on the stock TIM they used between the die and the heatspreader.

Current Ryzen gen is limited to 3.8-4.1GHz on clocks. In my experience I keep my R5 1600 at 3.8GHz because I can set a really low voltage and keep a good overclock while having thermals in check, I do run a closed loop cooler though. 3200MHz memory is probably pretty expensive, you can sometimes find lower clocked memory modules that can overclock, but the memory controller on the CPU is picky sometimes and might not run the desired clock speed unless it is guaranteed to run it.

For Intel you have to have both the CPU and motherboard that can support overclocking in order to get anything higher than 2666MHz on the memory. If you are planning to upgrade to the i7 later, you might have to invest in a Z370 board regardless.

For gaming you can get extra 5-10FPS on games on lower resolutions with Kaby/Coffee Lake CPU, it's worth it to hit near 144FPS if you have the monitor to refresh that fast. If you don't plan on high-FPS, I think the R5 1600 extra SMT cores trump the i5-8400 from a longevity standpoint.

I've been on the i5-2400 before, but I could overclock that to some degree. It lasted quite a while and going to R5 1600 was a big jump in performance, but some games still prefer faster clock speeds over core count. A lot of older titles still love Intel's better single-thread, but now that Ryzen is pretty close in terms of that (it's pretty equal to Haswell chips and people are still happy with their 4790K's). It's not much of a big deal, especially if you're gaming over 1080p.

So be aware of those factors. In the end, you probably want a good price-performance ratio and right now Ryzen 5 1600 delivers, until Intel decides to release lower-end motherboards, Ryzen is the better choice.

It's a great shame Intel locked down most SKU overclocking. I always like to entertain the idea of the i5-8400 being OC'd, it would be a complete beast. But it will never happen, because that would cut into sales of their other CPU's and they don't want that.

While the i5-8400 is great, I don't see any point pairing it with a Z370 board, because those are the only motherboards that are out right now and the cheapest one will set you back a bit more. Strange how the other chipset boards are delayed.

A B350 board will do overclocking and will be kinda cheap depending on where you get it. The on-board sound is probably going to be strapped with older Realtek codec, which in my experience isn't good in 2017, it's OK but don't expect the on-board sound to be good unless you opt for motherboards that have ALC1220 codec.

Either I go for will have a future CPU upgrade, Zen 2 on the AMD side and as I mentioned for the Intel it would have to be the currently released 8700K so I higher end board on either platform is something I'm kean on anyway.

It's better to invest in a better graphics card anyway. That's what games are really going to benefit from. Unless they are CPU bound, which not many of them are.

Those 5% performance improvements each gen are sending everyone and their cat into panic mode sometimes and people start selling their CPU+MB combo immediately. I think this only applies to people that are running best Intel everything and have money to drop, but the point stands.

Skylake/Kaby Lake are still very good, especially the i7's, hell even Ivy Bridge and Haswell kick ass (though increased core count for those parts is desired...), because Intel didn't improve much in the raw performance, performance per watt is more important now.

You won't be able to upgrade to current flagship i7 8700K in a few years. It will be long gone, maybe second hand used, overvalued beaten to a pulp by unreasonable 1.4V and 5.Ghz and etc..

In its place some 10nm 8-Core with triple the transistor density of current 14nm. And it won't be supported by Z370. So that motherboard is junk.

Zen+ can be at least 10% faster moving to 12nm by clock speeds. and slightly smaller. They could join the dual 4-core CCX to a single 8-core CCX, until then it is just high core ping latency riddled junk..

And why do this upgrade now, prices of memory are insane. wait till 35$ per 8GB and wait for everything to transition to 10nm and build something really impressive. You have a pretty decent setup now.

Yeah, the last couple of gens offer little improvement...makes sense they still work fine. That said, its literally been slightly over 2 years for broadwell and skylake releases...not enough time to go stale. This dude is talking several years. Like sandybridge style released in 2011. Seems like thats how long he wants to keep it... while SB cpus are still potent, they are ptlutting a glass ceiling on many titles, particularly with higher end video cards.

If you want to stay on a platform for longer go for Ryzen, Intel is switching platforms almost every year. There isn't much a difference between those CPUs, but in my opinion a unlocked CPU is better. Ryzen also has SMT compared to none on the i5. Take the R5 1600 and overclock it on a decent mainboard. That's my opinion. You will get decent performance anyway.

8400 + Z370 SLI Plus. Best price/perf for gaming ATM. You may still wait for B360, but that's next year. It's worth the wait tho, since if you're gonna use it for gaming then those 6 core i5s are really sweet spot for budget rigs. Still, if by any chance you can splurge to get a 8600K and Z370 SLI Plus, then they're worth it by all means.

I'm pretty torn, I was set on Ryzen until Coffee Lake got released! I don't upgrade my rig very often, I do plan on upgrading the CPU in a few years though, that's why I wanted Ryzen in the first place as I knew Zen 2 will offer more. Now I'm thinking how much more can Zen 2 actually offer? Will it beat the current flagship i7 8700K that I could upgrade to in a few years or will it offer more than that? If Zen 2's lineup is highly likely to offer something more than the i7 8700K then it makes sense to stick with a Ryzen for now as budget is limited and always will be. The rig won't likely ever be used outside of the desktop use or gaming.

The i5-8400 is without a doubt an excellent CPU, meaning that those cores are pretty smart and can at the same time turbo at 3.8GHz, something the Ryzen can't do, without manually OCing. If you like OCing than it's better to get the Ryzen. The upgrade path will be open for longer, the extra threads will help in some scenarios. But also keep in mind, with Ryzen you will need faster RAM, which will increase the cost of the build.

Personally I'd go with the i5-8400 because I feel for the same OCed performance of Ryzen, you get lower TDP, since OCing will use more power. When I was younger, I loved OCing etc, but now I just want a stable working machine. Maybe this will change in the future, I don't know. As of GPU both can handle high end GPUs, but I wouldn't put more than a GTX 1080 in there.

Edit: As far as Zen 2 goes, no one knows, but AMD has promised a lot of exciting stuff liek increased IPC, higher clocks etc. I would bet on 4GHz stock clocks on most/all models and 4.5-4.7GHz Turbo. I also believe they will increase clock count on the different Ryzen models, eg Ryzen 3 will be like R5, and R5 like R7 and maybe R7 like some TR models.

The i5-8400 is without a doubt an excellent CPU, meaning that those cores are pretty smart and can at the same time turbo at 3.8GHz, something the Ryzen can't do, without manually OCing. If you like OCing than it's better to get the Ryzen. The upgrade path will be open for longer, the extra threads will help in some scenarios. But also keep in mind, with Ryzen you will need faster RAM, which will increase the cost of the build.

Personally I'd go with the i5-8400 because I feel for the same OCed performance of Ryzen, you get lower TDP, since OCing will use more power. When I was younger, I loved OCing etc, but now I just want a stable working machine. Maybe this will change in the future, I don't know. As of GPU both can handle high end GPUs, but I wouldn't put more than a GTX 1080 in there.

Edit: As far as Zen 2 goes, no one knows, but AMD has promised a lot of exciting stuff liek increased IPC, higher clocks etc. I would bet on 4GHz stock clocks on most/all models and 4.5-4.7GHz Turbo. I also believe they will increase clock count on the different Ryzen models, eg Ryzen 3 will be like R5, and R5 like R7 and maybe R7 like some TR models.

Basically 3.8GHz on all cores is like the speed guaranteed only in an ideal scenario, especially considering the cheapo cooler Intel sells them along with. So while the stock 8400 would likely be faster at stock vs 1600, once OCed I'd expect the 1600 to be faster on avg, except in rare cases where ST performance matters, even then it'd be real close.

i5 for the love of GOD! Cuz i lost the again....first it was with Amd RX series and the useless FreeSync. and now with the new 1700x, witch is also useless.
When will i ever learn ?! Problem is.... nobody kinda supports. They just argue on no valid facts. In the end the decision is just yours. I watched so many reviews, decided to go with Amd... and i was wrong!
Amd sucks! Intel is the only way to go.

i5 for the love of GOD! Cuz i lost the again....first it was with Amd RX series and the useless FreeSync. and now with the new 1700x, witch is also useless.
When will i ever learn ?! Problem is.... nobody kinda supports. They just argue on no valid facts. In the end the decision is just yours. I watched so many reviews, decided to go with Amd... and i was wrong!
Amd sucks! Intel is the only way to go.

Basically 3.8GHz on all cores is like the speed guaranteed only in an ideal scenario, especially considering the cheapo cooler Intel sells them along with. So while the stock 8400 would likely be faster at stock vs 1600, once OCed I'd expect the 1600 to be faster on avg, except in rare cases where ST performance matters, even then it'd be real close.

Actually the multiplier goes down to 39 when you OC the BCLK, CPUz is right, core temp is likely reporting the wrong frequency. I've seen this elsewhere as well, all this just to get a 100 or 200 MHz OC is not worth it IMO.

I'd get the 8400 as a low(er) power option, for sure, if I want something slightly more powerful I'd pick the 1600 & also because I like to OC.